In fairness, it may take with a pinch of salt the path to a specific file I'm giving it and will just satisfy itself loading all the pictures in the same directory as the last one I passed. I will be able to give it as argument a directory or a list of photos. While darktable offers a so-called lighttable to organise, tag, sort and filter my photos, it doesn't pretend to be an end-to-end photo manager.

And that's possibly also thanks to the ease of use of darktable. One of these brought me up to speed: in a matter of half an hour, I knew how to give my photos a quality I never thought I could. If I couldn't find a getting-started guide from the darktable website, only more of a reference manual, I found that the community is sufficiently enthusiastic to provide video tutorials. They say darktable is the tool of choice for people who are familiar with Adobe Lightroom – which I wasn't either, but I did see what other people do with it and I liked it. My first serious experience with raw photo editing was darktable, and I was immediately impressed.

I've got a hierarchical filesystem, where I can give files and directories names and which I can work with using convenient and standard UNIX commands. It shouldn't intrusively try to manage my pictures.It has to provide the interface to make raw photo processing seamlessly fit in my workflow, which will involve other tools ranging from vector graphics programs such as Inkscape to makefiles to apply corrections noninteractively once interactively defined.Click there and make it look right, sort of thing. It has to help me make my photos look good without too much photo and image processing knowledge.

In my particular use case, this means three things: I was looking for a raw editor which could help me process and make use of my pictures quickly.

A review of raw photo editors by somebody who doesn't know much about photos, for somebody who doesn't know much about photos, but does know their UNIX.

Rawtherapee vs darktable 2018